“Take the gun.”

That’s advice from the mysterious, and mostly unseen Maria Beetle, voiced and later portrayed by Sandra Bullock, as she instructs hired goon Ladybug (Brad Pitt) on his next job. It should be simple: board a bullet train heading from Tokyo to Kyoto, find a briefcase and nab it, hopping off the train as soon as possible. Ladybug is there because the first goon couldn’t make it, and he dreads the job figuring something is going to mess up his easy payday.

And he’s right; there’s a wrinkle, and then another, and then another, ad infinitum. Bullet Train the movie spends a lengthy but engaging 126 minutes showing every possible thing going wrong for the unlucky Ladybug, who must fight off a rogue’s gallery of goons who boarded the train for the approximately the same reason he did.

There’s Wolf (played by Bad Bunny, credited as Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), a Mexican gangster who wants revenge for something he thinks Ladybug did, there is the delightful, if slightly dumb duo of Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) who were in charge of the briefcase initially, supposedly returning it and the son (Logan Lerman) of a major crime syndicate boss, Kimura (Andrew Koji), aka “The Father,” who doesn’t care about the briefcase but has his own agenda, Prince (Joey King), the daughter of that syndicate boss, aka “White Death,” and The Hornet (Zazie Beetz), an assassin who specializes in poisoning her victims.

It’s a lot, and that’s really only a brief sketch of all the characters. (There are a few amusing cameos that should not be spoiled in any review, as it would definitely ruin the moment to know in advance about those reveals.) The movie, directed by David Leitch, who helmed Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, and The Fast and The Furious: Hobbs and Shaw, uses on-screen graphics, flashbacks, and even a little fourth-wall breaking, to introduce each character and explain his or her motivation.

The action in the movie is pretty much non-stop, with each new scene setting up a fight between two or three characters, and the fight choreography is fun and inventive, sometimes brutal and gory and sometimes humorous and fun, but always stylized and captivating.

Leitch knows his stunts, and has even doubled for Pitt in movies like Fight Club, Ocean’s Eleven and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, so it’s no surprise how well-realized the action is. It’s less of a thriller than it is an action-comedy.

If there are issues to be had with the movie, it’s with Zak Olkewicz’s screenplay. While all the character arcs do eventurally meet in a single point, in the character of White Death (Michael Shannon), the movie does take a rather lengthy look at his backstory, keeping us off the train for far too long. And Pitt’s character spouting faux-Zen therapy-speak like affirmations about mindfulness gets pretty tedious after a while, something even the other characters seem to admit.

Worse than that, there are not one, not two, but three male characters whose wives were “fridged” to start them on their journeys of revenge and recovery. (A fourth male character is vowing vengeance for an act of violence against his son.) There must be some other motivating factor for male characters out there, and here’s hoping some intrepid screenwriter finds it.

Still, the casting choices are quite good. Taylor-Johnson, who is British, and Henry, who is not, play the “twins,” Tangerine and Lemon, as Cockney ne’er-do-wells with enormous charm, and their characters have such amazing chemistry that the movie loses a little something when the focus is not on them. You’ll never watch Thomas the Tank Engine the same way again.

Pitt is lovably goofy as Ladybug, keeping the tone of the movie playful despite all the attempted (and successful) murders happening around him. And the only two main characters who are Japanese, Kimura and his father, “The Elder,” played by Hiroyuki Sanada, are thankfully given a good chunk of screen time for their stories.

The movie is based on a novel by Kôtarô Isaka, published in Japan as Maria Beetle and in English-speaking countries as Bullet Train. For anyone concerned about the western-washing of the cast, in the book, the characters are all ostensibly Japanese, but in the film, most of the cast is American or British. Isaka in an interview with the New York Times has said that he is fine with the more global casting choices, saying his characters are “not real people, and maybe they’re not even Japanese.”